Many periodicals now claim that they will not take advertisements that look fraudulent or even misleading. Some papers, like the London "Times," have a guaranteed list of advertisements which they have investigated and vouch for, though naturally the advertisers have to pay extra for the guarantee.
"The Sunday School Times" printed, several weeks ago, a long list of secular papers that were "going dry," as so many of our Southern states. The fact that our best periodicals no longer accept liquor advertisements is another one of the encouraging signs of the coming of the new journalism.
The vigorous fight that "The Ladies' Home Journal" and "Collier's" waged against the patent-medicine concerns is too fresh in the public memory to need recounting here. The two pictures printed cheek by jowl in "The Ladies' Home Journal,"--one, of the tombstone above the mortal remains of Lydia E. Pinkham, whose inscription showed that she had been dead since 1883, and the other an advertisement representing Lydia in 1905, sitting in her laboratory at Lynn, Massachusetts, engrossed in assuaging the sufferings of ailing womanhood,--these are eloquent of the type of fraud perpetrated through the press upon a gullible public.
Similarly, in the negro papers the favorite advertisements are those that claim to straighten kinky hair and bleach complexions--all fakes, of course. Perhaps the most fraudulent advertisements, however, are those which purpose to sell mines in Brazil, Mexico, Alaska, or wherever else the investor is unlikely to go. These offer their shares often as low as ten cents each, and guarantee fabulous profits. I have a college classmate who is extensively interested in Mexican mines, and he tells me that literally 99 per cent of all the mining companies that float their shares through advertisements are pure, or rather impure, swindles. I am not in the least surprised, for I know how many letters come to a financial editor from the dupes of these slick mine promoters, asking advice as to how they can get their money back.
The most demoralizing advertisements are those paid for by loan-sharks, clairvoyants, medical quacks, and the votaries of vice. The New York "Herald" has recently stopped printing its vicious personals. It also refuses fortune-tellers the hospitality of its columns, though it is not so squeamish in regard to loan-agencies and patent medicines. How many papers still publish the advertisement of Mrs. Laudanum's soothing syrup for babies? When you remember that the proprietary medicine concerns have been accustomed to spend forty million dollars a year, which is distributed among the papers of the land, you can see that it requires considerable financial independence for a publisher to forego a taste of their patronage.